‘Eleven Hours,’ by Pamela Erens

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By Jen McDonald

May 6, 2016

ELEVEN HOURS By Pamela Erens165 pp. Tin House Books. Paper, $15.95.

“Eleven Hours,” by Pamela Erens, is a story about birth, which is to say a story about life and death. You could read the novel in less time than it takes many women to endure the first stage of labor — though for the anxiety it induces, I wouldn’t recommend it to the laboring woman trying to pass the time.

In her previous two books, “The Virgins” and “The Understory,” Erens wrote from the first-person perspectives of disturbed and damaged men. “Eleven Hours” is told from the perspectives of two female characters and unfolds, as labor does, as continuous experience, shifting fluidly across time and point of view without chapter breaks, with barely a pause for air.

Lore, in labor, arrives alone at a New York City hospital. Franckline, a maternity nurse in the second trimester of her own pregnancy, is baffled, for this is “almost unheard-of: Even the homeless addicts sometimes have a man or a friend.” The women’s exchanges are initially wary, prickly. But soon the two are thrown into a fierce, physical intimacy as Franckline coaxes Lore through the waves of pain. Lore “wraps her arms hard around Franckline’s frame. . . . Their faces are inches apart and Lore can smell the subtle, spicy odor of Franckline’s skin. . . . She doesn’t want to shout or moan into Franckline’s face, but the nurse is encouraging her, urging her, and she complies.”

Through the curve and sway of memory we learn about Lore’s and Franckline’s lives outside the hospital. Both women have faced isolating hardship. Both are exiled from family: Franckline from her parents and siblings in Haiti; Lore, parentless, from her chosen tribe in New York — the father of her child and her mercurial best friend, both of whom have betrayed her.

Franckline has deep experience with the trauma of labor, having been an eager witness since childhood. Every time “she would run, more than a mile if necessary,” to see “the squatting woman, the way her sisters and aunties and cousins would cluster around her, gripping her arms and steadying her hips, running with sweat all of them, the parched lips and the low humming songs; it was like the races the older boys and young men sometimes ran against each other, the strain of bodies pushed to their limits, the pain, the exhaustion, the glory in the finish, but better because more violent.”

Older now and wounded by pregnancies gone wrong, Franckline knows better than to romanticize birth’s violence. “Having a child is usually just a long patience,” she tells Lore, though both know there’s no “just” about it. It may be impossible to reproduce in prose the sensation of labor. But Erens beautifully evokes its insistent rhythms and protective deliriums. As Lore submits to a new surge of pain, “the place behind her eyes winks with pricks of light, interior stars, and, slowly, location retreats. There is no room around her, no hospital. . . . She is untethered, a blurry presence smudged across a dense atmosphere.”

“Lore,” the noun, refers to a body of knowledge, to story passed down. Pregnant women are often assured this knowledge resides in the body itself. “Surrender,” they are told. “Your body knows what to do.” Into Lore’s mouth Erens pours the argot of birth manuals, which impart a story of their own about what makes a “good” birth, and how to prepare.

Lore seems more prepared than most. Yet 30 ­pages from the end of ­“Eleven Hours” she is thrust into a savage agony, and we find ourselves inside a novel with the ­adrenaline-rush pacing of an action movie, the gut-turning terror of a horror flick. We are reminded that every birth is an event without script, the ultimate suspense story.

Erens registers this without preaching and without judgment, creating one of the most realistic and harrowing portrayals of birth you are likely to encounter in fiction. She has also written an indelible portrait of two women coming to terms with the desire, fear, crushing losses and fragile joys that have carved their lives, and who know what it means to fight every hour, every minute, to take another breath.

Jen McDonald, a former editor at the Book Review, is an editor and writer based in Chicago.